IBM and the Holocaust (19 page)

Lists were indeed everywhere. Non-German Registries were maintained in police stations, employment bureaus, professional associations, church organizations, local Nazi departments, and the SS Security Office, the
Sicherheitsdienst,
known as the SD. The SD was under the control of Reinhard Heydrich, nicknamed the Hangman.

Buried within the bowels of Heydrich's Berlin office was the Department of Research, which developed registries on Freemasons. In 1934, one of the SD's nameless specialists on Freemasons demonstrating particular zeal was a corporal who had just transferred in from the Dachau concentration camp. He showed such promise working with registries that he was re-assigned to
Referat
II 112, the Jewish Department, where he could work with more lists. The corporal's name was Adolf Eichmann.
⁷³

As the cross-indexing capabilities and sorting routines of Dehomag's machinery became more sophisticated, race researchers continuously discovered greater informational depth about Jews and those of Jewish bloodline. For Dehomag, such statistical feats were both its science and its competitive edge. Educating its customers was an everyday occurrence.

An August 1934 article in the Dehomag publication,
Hollerith Nachrichten,
extolled the benefits of advanced data processing. The article, entitled "An Improved Analysis of Statistical Interdependencies via Hollerith Punch Card Process," illustrated how difficult data calculations could be better interpreted and predict probabilities. As a prime example, the journal cited "the field of medicine, and the science of genetics and race." Complex tabulations could be rendered, the article suggested, regarding "the size of fathers and their children, number of children and parents. Diphtheria and age, and the different racial characteristics." The article explained, "Even though the gathering of statistical material in industrial and commercial businesses has steadily grown in size . . . in administrative archives and because of censuses and other surveys, the interpretation has not kept pace. Due to the lack of manpower . . . one is limited . . . to sorting out past developments. . . . This is not always enough. . . . The actual justification for the collection of data in great quantity is the ability to draw conclusions . . . and ensure a safe estimate of future and current occurrences."
⁷⁴

Racial purity was not just a catchphrase for Nazis, it was an obsession. Germany wanted more than a society of Aryans, it wanted a master race: tall, strong, blond, and blue-eyed, intellectually and physically dominant. Eugenics became an elite cult. Nazis sought to weed out the weaker elements of its population, regardless of parentage—even from among their own people. The mentally ill, diseased, handicapped, homosexual individuals, certain Jews, Gypsies, and a group of misfits termed "anti-social," were not to be part of Germany's future.

Beginning in summer 1934, the Third Reich took the next step. Armed with statistical data and other information collected from medical offices, doctors, and insurance companies across the nation, Germany began organized sterilization.

TWO DECREES
were promulgated by mid-1934. One was
The Law for Simplification of the Health System,
enacted in July 1934, requiring doctors and other clinicians to fill out detailed forms about the health condition of their patients. These were filed with Health Offices and eventually processed by Hollerith systems at the Reich Statistical Offices in Berlin and its regional divisions. The information, combined with extensive information from health insurance questionnaires, created a eugenic profile.
⁷⁵

The second decree was
The Law for the Prevention of Genetically Sick
Offspring,
made active in January 1934. Eugenic theorists in Germany had developed a maze of precepts mandating exactly which bloodlines should be terminated based on the statistical probability of endowing defective genes. Sterilization guidelines initially specified individuals deemed insane, retarded, epileptic, or manic-depressive, among others.
⁷⁶

But now eugenic pseudo-academicians and Nazi statisticians evolved an additional belief that a man's right to live was determined by his net worth to Nazi society. "The only value of man—and this is a direct object of statistics—is his economic value . . . his human labor productivity," wrote Fried rich Zahn in a 1934 edition of the German statistical journal,
Allgemeines Statistisches Archiv.
Zahn's article, "The Economic Value of Man As an Object of Statistics," reminded that, "statistics is identical in character with the National Socialist idea."
⁷⁷

Zahn called for a "registration of the various risks which threaten the value of productivity . . . [as a result of] . . . illnesses, disability, unemployment and non-accomplishment of occupational goals." Population engineering, he emphasized, would rely upon extensive data analysis, including statistics from a gamut of health bureaus, disability and liability insurers, unemployment offices, and even academic testing data from schools.
⁷⁸

Nazi genetic experts worried about not only those individuals exhibiting undesired traits, but the parents and/or children who might carry those traits and therefore contaminate the gene pool. One census theoretician postulated that the potential for contamination could be set at a 25 percent chance per diseased parent. Hence, once an undesirable person was identified, the parents and offspring, including newborn children, required sterilization as well.
⁷⁹

Quickly, the notion of sterilizing the physically undesirable expanded to include the
socially
undesirable. So-called
anti-socials,
that is, misfits who seemed to be unsuited for labor, became special targets. A leading raceologist described anti-socials as "those who, based on their personality, are not capable of meeting the minimum requirements of society,
i.e.,
personal, social, and
volkisch
behavior." One official definition cited: "human beings with a hereditary and irreversible mental attitude, who . . . have repeatedly come into conflict with government agencies and the courts, and thus appear . . . a threat to humanity." Included were traitors, race violators, sexual perverts, and "secret Jews." But, "the numerically largest group consists of 'the work-shy and habitual parasites.' "
⁸⁰

Compulsory sterilization was aimed principally at those adjudged physically and mentally inferior regardless of their race or nationality. However, the criteria applied not only to general groups exhibiting the proscribed characteristics, but, in the new lexicon of anti-Semitism, to virtually all Jews within Germany.

Dehomag systems compiled nearly all the medical, health, and welfare statistics in Germany, either at the compilation site or through the Reich Statistical Office.
Hollerith Nachrichten
aggressively proliferated its population-engineering technology to new customers. An article entitled "The Hollerith Punch Card Process in Welfare and Social Security" boasted, "sorting procedures are done by Hollerith machines with such speed and reliability that the directors of the welfare administration are unrestricted in their catalog of questions." It added, "The solution is that every interesting feature of a statistical nature . . . can be summarized . . . by one basic factor. This basic factor is the Hollerith punch card."
⁸¹

Questionnaires, although to be filled out by hand, were jointly de signed by Dehomag engineers and Nazi disability or welfare experts for compatibility, since ultimately all information would be punched into Hollerith cards. Yet, as a Dehomag notice to users advised, the questionnaires would have to be adapted to the technical demands of the Hollerith system, not the other way around. A vertical notice printed along the bottom left of typical welfare forms often indicated the information was to be processed "by the punch card office," generally an in-house bureau.
⁸²

People seated in a doctor's office or a welfare line never comprehended the destiny of routine information about their personal traits and conditions. Question 11 required a handwritten checkmark if the individual was a
foreigner.
Later, this information was punched into the correlating punch card in columns 29-30 under
nationality.
⁸³

For many clerks and doctors, coding was a new procedure. Various editions of
Hollerith Nachrichten
tutored readers on the proper method of filling out Hollerith-compatible forms. In one issue it reminded form processors to code Special Characteristics in the several columns field 12. Anti-social was to be coded 1 in one column. In a second column, diseases such as blindness were coded 1. Mental disease was 2. Cripples were 3. Deaf people were 5. Parents who had already been sterilized were to be noted with an
"s"
; children already sterilized "because of a parent's sickness" were noted
"as."
⁸⁴

Uniform codes were established for occupations. Factory workers were coded 19, hotel and guesthouse workers were 23, theatre artisans were 26. Unemployed persons received the code number 28. These codes were handwritten into field 8 on the forms.
⁸⁵

Diseases were also coded: influenza was 3, lupus was 7, syphilis was 9, diabetes was 15; they were entered into field 9.
⁸⁶

Once coded and punched, all data was then sorted by machine.

If agencies lacked the manpower to undertake their registrations, or the money to buy the equipment, Dehomag would perform the work for them. Insurers, for example, could send quarterly data directly to the Lichterfelde office for processing. Volume was important. "Since the work is done by Dehomag," advertised a company solicitation, the approach was recommended for any insurance company carrying "more than 15,000 members."
⁸⁷

Graphs, organizational charts, and work flow diagrams published by Dehomag bolstered the modern technological feat of its data processing. One work flow diagram showed the complex method by which handwritten forms and questionnaires in any agency's master personnel file were marshaled through a dozen separate sorting, proofing, resorting, and tabulating stages until results were finalized.
⁸⁸
An individual looking at a plain paper form filled out by pen or pencil might never comprehend the tortuous route that document would take through the Hollerith process.

One of the most aggressive locales implementing Hollerith technology for race science was the city of Hamburg. Doctors there submitted extensive forms on all their patients to a Central Health Passport Archive where the information could be retrieved when needed and exchanged with other registries. Archive officials asked for reciprocal exchanges with "health and welfare institutions of all kinds, economic welfare, youth and education welfare, court decisions, special foster care, sterilizations . . . and all other sentences where personality evaluations are considered."
⁸⁹

Raceology was enabled as never before. Statistician Zahn extolled the fact that "registered persons can be observed continually, [through] the cooperation of statistical central offices . . . [so] other statistical population matters can be settled and regulated." Zahn proposed "a single file for [the] entire population to make possible an ethnic biological diagnosis [to] turn today's theory into tomorrow's practice. Such a file would serve both practical considerations as well as science," he argued, adding, "Clarified pictures of the volume of genetic diseases within the population . . . now gives science a new impetus to conduct research . . . which should promote good instead of bad genetic stock."
⁹⁰

Genetic denunciations and routine evaluations were adjudicated by the Genetic Health Courts based on a combination of anecdotal evidence and Hollerith data. The accused included parents guilty of no more than the mis-fortune of a birth-defected child, innocent newborns of the statistically suspect, helpless individuals condemned as depressed or psychiatric within a world gone mad, and those who just didn't fit into the new Nazi milieu.
⁹¹

In the sterilization program's first year, 1934, more than 84,600 cases brought to the Genetic Health Courts resulted in 62,400 forced sterilizations. In 1935, 88,100 genetic trials yielded 71,700 forced sterilizations.
⁹²

Eventually, sterilization was viewed as merely preliminary to more drastic measures for cleansing the Reich. Zahn warned in a statistical journal article: "population politics, according to the principles of racial hygiene, must promote valuable genetic stock, prevent the fertility of inferior life, and be aware of genetic degeneration. In other words, this means superior life selection on the one hand, and the eradication of genetically unwanted stock on the other hand. The ethnic biological diagnosis is indispensable to carry out this task."
⁹³